In my last post, I wrote about the shift of industry to “green products” and sustainable growth, as a reaction on the publication “The Limits to Growth” in 1972.

However, this book has not only been praised, it was also criticized strongly and provoked a big debate on the topics like limitations, scarce resources and the overshooting growth.

One of the main arguments of the opponents was that the publication was not scientific and detailed enough and therefore not accurate, because of the ignorance of other economic models and assumptions. As a consequence, opponents argued that the computer model, that the author used to run the scenarios of possible future developments, was misleading. Continue reading →

Three weeks ago I wrote the blog post “The future of our world…” describing the basic ideas of the Club of Rome, to name some key aspects, it was concerned with the limits to growth. However growth does not necessarily lead to collapse and horror-scenarios. “Collapse follows growth only if the growth has led to overshoot, to an expansion in demands on the plant´s sources” (Book: Limits to Growth, The 30 Year Update). So what is happening now is that “human resource use is currently some 20 percent above the global carrying capacity” (Book: Limits to Growth, The 30 Year Update), to put it in other words, world´s population uses more resources up than the world can bear to be sustainable. Continue reading →

Last week I wrote about agricultural start-up businesses in the third-world, in Nicaragua. So this week I would like to focus on a local business idea in Berlin that is pretty new and came up short time ago.

Due to the ever growing petrol prices, more and more people decide to go by bike rather than use a car. Therefore bicycling plays an increasing role as a means of transport, over all in cities, for more and more people. The idea of the start-up company “Fahrer” was to individualize bicycling, to make cycles be eyecatchers. But the products of “Fahrer” should not only be individual, but also provide more comfort for bikers and support their mobility. Continue reading →

After leaving my secondary school, I was wondering what to do with my future life. To get to know another life, culture and reality I decided to do a gap year in Nicaragua. When working in the social organization IMC (Instituto Mujer y Comunidad), I got to know a lot of people living in very poor conditions. One of them was Maria Francis Rodriguez Jose who told me about her life full of problems. Continue reading →